CULTURE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9mLFJZ-H-4 In ancient Egypt, writ­ing hiero­glyphs was a high­ly spe­cial­ized skill, one com­mand­ed by only a small frac­tion of the pop­u­la­tion. The fact that there were more than 1,000 char­ac­ters to mem­o­rize prob­a­bly had some­thing to do with that, but...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfDLoIvb0w4 In Italy, rough­ly 70% of house­holds have a Bialet­ti Moka Pot. And chances are you have one too. But are you using it the right way? Prob­a­bly not, says James Hoff­mann, the author of The World Atlas of Cof­fee. Above,...

Imag­ine you could talk to Hierony­mus Bosch, the authors of the Book of Rev­e­la­tion, or of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script—a bizarre 15th cen­tu­ry text writ­ten in an uncrack­able code; that you could solve cen­turies-old mys­ter­ies by ask­ing them, “what were you...

Here’s anoth­er thing you can cred­it Thomas Jef­fer­son with: being the first known Amer­i­can to record an ice cream recipe. It’s one of 10 sur­viv­ing recipes writ­ten by the found­ing father. Accord­ing to Monticello.org, ice cream began appear­ing “in French cook­books...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQrG1wDIDBM We’ve all stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, though most of us have done so only in our minds, through such cul­tur­al arti­facts as Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” Bob Dylan’s “Sara,” Nico’s “Chelsea Girls,” Andy Warhol’s epony­mous film...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjbJwnUd3Pw Built dur­ing the depths of the Great Depres­sion (from 1933 to 1937), the Gold­en Gate Bridge became the longest and tallest sus­pen­sion bridge in the world. Dur­ing its con­struc­tion, work­ers bat­tled harsh con­di­tions — strong winds, thick fog, and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yv_MXNYbAo The say­ing “You can’t take it with you” may be a cliché to all of us here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, but it would hard­ly have made sense to an ancient Egypt­ian. One of the most wide­ly known qual­i­ties...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL4LxrN-iyw One thing they don’t teach you in par­ent­ing school is how to guide a young child into mak­ing few­er mis­takes in her home­work, while also com­mu­ni­cat­ing to her that mis­takes are not “bad” but often “good” in that they...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjCS_u3Sgpg The expres­sion “Don’t quit your day job” is often used as an insult, imply­ing that the recip­i­en­t’s cre­ative skills aren’t up to attract­ing a career-sup­port­ing audi­ence. But it can also be prac­ti­cal advice in cer­tain cas­es, espe­cial­ly those of...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg “Through­out U.S. his­to­ry, our mil­i­tary has been used not for moral pur­pos­es but to expand eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal, and mil­i­tary pow­er,” says a car­toon Howard Zinn in Mike Konopacki’s 273-page com­ic book A People’s His­to­ry of Amer­i­can Empire. Writ­ten with...